Monthly Archives: November 2010

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One thing is certain: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was never nominated for Homecoming King. Not that he would have cared, though he’s still nobody’s darling now. Even without the pandemonium following the WikiLeaks leak, he’s still wanted for sexual assault in Sweden, though being a meshugenah, he thought everything was consensual and hunky-dory.

Still, there are lines that a normal person just doesn’t cross. A munitions expert doesn’t build a bomb that blows up every part of the world except for the one he’s in. A sharp shooter doesn’t pull the trigger at whimsy or will. No one ever heard about Oscar de la Hoya throwing punches at a young hopeful at a gym and Arnold Palmer never hit anyone over the head with a golf club. So the “use it or lose it” principle doesn’t always apply.

Like Jonathan wrote, some of WikiLeak’s secrets aren’t so secret at all. After all, most people know that the Sunni and the Shiite Moslems aren’t going to start a choir and sing “It’s a Small World” anytime soon. Hillary Clinton signing an order to spy on American diplomats abroad? Sounds unseemly but who can you really trust after Benedict Arnold? For all we know, Clinton, Obama and Rahm Emanuel may be spying on each other, too.

But the point where it fell off the deep-end is when our esteemed Secretary of State not only gave her off the record analysis of other world leaders but tried enticing American diplomats to spy on their fellow Americans. So she may have some ‘splaining to do in front of a Senate subcommittee. But her worries will last no longer than the average Hollywood marriage because of the advent of the PR firm. If they can make some pop tarts look good, think what they could do for her now.

The good news is that Assange exposed some of our feckless leaders for what they are. And the bad news is that he exposed them for what they are. I’d probably want his head, too if it had been me.

It’s always embarrassing to get caught taking a WikiLeak in public.The latest revelations of our not so secret correspondence with our diplomats are indeed embarrassing but hardly a national disaster. These leaks do not add significantly to our knowledge base. They neither bust wrongdoers, as did the revelation of the Pentagon Papers, nor do they compromise our security. They merely confirm what we already knew.

This is the diplomatic version of finding out that the world is round, Ellen Degeneres is a Lesbian, professional wrestling is choreographed and Obama is a Muslim. Just kidding about the last one.

The 90 students in my current events classes at American Jewish University all know–because I told them:
1. The Saudis would like us, or even Israel, to attack Iran. They have assured airspace for our planes and refueling landing rights for our return.
2. Israel believes the Saudis will allow over-flights on the way to Iran, but is less trusting of landing and refueling.
3. The Arab nations (mostly Sunni) are in a larger struggle with Iran (Mostly Shiite) than with Israel.
4. This is why there was a relative silence from the Arabs when Israel was bombing the Iranian-supported Hezzbolah forces in southern Lebanon. Israel is sometimes a Saudi surrogate.
5. Israel knew it had to set back the Iranian nuclear program either with real bombs or cyber-bombs. This time they chose cyber warfare, the Stuxnet virus.
6. We do not think much of Hosni Mubarak or fancy the chances of stability in Egypt when he is gone.
7. Turkey is involved in an internal struggle with the elected Islamists pulling it east and the secular military pulling it towards Europe.
8. Nobody thinks well of Kim Jong-Il or his 29 year-old heir apparent. China would be happy to have a united and peaceful Korea.
9. Diplomats collect information and return misinformation. The late Sir Harold Nicholson said that the difference between a soldier and a diplomat is that a diplomat is paid to lie for his country. Diplomats have always gathered personal information on the leaders and potential leaders of the countries to which they are posted–friend or foe.
10. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are not great friends, are not popular at home and are both personally pretty prickly. They also represent (and try to govern) countries with very different national interests. Hmmm, Germany and France have different interests? Quel surprise!
11. Bonus: Hamid Karzai and his half brother Wali are considered both unstable and corrupt.

My students knew all this not because I’m either clairvoyant or have secret information, but because all of this has been in the public domain and available for those who search. The release and reprinting of these so-called leaks is neither heroic nor treasonous–but only an embarrassing gaff. Remember a political gaff is understood as occurring when someone accidentally tells the truth.

Just when you thought that LAUSD couldn’t be moredysfunctional, they outdo themselves. Someone came up with a hot idea. Why not start the school year in August? That way the kids could get three extra weeks of summer heat and be released into the world in the cool gloom of June. That way we could spend more money on air conditioning with absolutely no educational value. Yeah, that’s just what we need.

This idiocy did not spring ex-nihilo from the vacuum inside the head of a professional educator. No, it was rationalized as a way adding extra weeks to prepare the kids for statewide mandated testing. This way they could get a head start and do better on the tests, which, of course, would reflect glory on our local bureaucrats. The purpose of schools being to reflect glory on bureaucrats and not actually confer educational benefits on students, this seemed like pure genius.

The one hitch in all of this–aside from how well the kids would be able to learn in August Valley heat–was that the tests are mandated to take place when 85% (plus or minus 10) of school days have occurred. Thus moving the starting day up three weeks would move the tests up also. Oh dear. So, of course, the idea has been immediately dropped, right? Don’t be silly. Bureaucrats hate looking foolish–as if they hadn’t bothered to read the rules–so they are working to come up for new rationales for abusing our children.

Aside from the obvious incompetence and lack of care for the children, this misbegotten idea illustrates the dangers of teaching to tests. LAUSD has lost sight of its mission which is to teach. It has adopted a new mission which is to do well in the competitive game of test results. Their mission is to look good and have good numbers. Tragically, but predictably, the children and learning can go to hell–or the Valley in August, whichever is hotter.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

If someone ran a “Whacked Out Contest,” or one for those that must have recently been clubbed over the head with some foreign object, then Lloyd Schofield would be the hourly winner.

The San Francisco resident has proposed a measure to ban infant circumcision in the city limits. Hopefully the thing won’t get passed, though if he can garner the 7,100 signatures needed, it will go on a ballot. If it does, and let’s admit that stranger things have happened, then any violator will be accused of a misdemeanor, fined $1,000.00 and spend a year in jail. The rabbis and mohels probably don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But who knows what really lies in the breasts of mortal men? Maybe Schofield equates the loss of his with a mediocre or paltry sex life. Maybe he thinks that things would be better if he had his back. (No one knows for sure because he’s not telling what happened to his, if it is still affixed or not or where the darned thing even went.)

But as an intactivist, as in one who believes in keeping things intact, Schofield says that he wants the practice banned because it is painful, risky and unethical, but he is wrong on all three.

My great-great grandfather, Velvel Koragodsky of Nairodich, Russia, sired eleven children, so the operation didn’t hurt him one bit. And it hasn’t hurt any of us either, or stopped us from peopling the planet when we so desired. Also, Jewish women have a lower incidence of cervical cancer. Barring variables like mahjong and chicken soup leaves only one other explanation.

Besides, what kind of a memory does an eight-day old baby have? After traveling down the birth canal, just about anything else would look lame by comparison. Some of them are rescued from garbage cans and go on to lead sane, productive and rational lives being none the wiser for it.

In terms of a healthy and functional tissue, he might want to do his homework. In the words of one esteem anesthesiologist before one such operation on a boy, “a lot of gunk gets down there and that can lead to all sorts of infections,” so the old foreskin sometimes has to get the heave-ho after all.

My former twelve-year-old neighbor needed one after a series of infections. Six weeks later, he was still walking like he had just gotten off of a horse while an eight day-old baby bounces back and is on to other things more quickly.

Schofield’s other argument is that the parents shouldn’t be able to tell the children what to do with their bodies. Yet this is exactly the problem. No one is telling them what to do, or if they are, they aren’t listening, so they get piercings and tattoos, drink, get pregnant and do all sorts of things to their bodies that have long been thought of as outside the realm of normal.

But that must also mean that we also shouldn’t tell them what to do with their bodies as in sit in a chair in a classroom, run the track and field in PE or show up at any other place that the average kid tries to avoid. We should be telling them exactly where to put their bodies and then some.

The next time Lloyd Schofield wants to rally for a cause, let him select something that doesn’t have a 4,000 year-old seal of approval and a longer half-life than uranium.

President Obama should turn a deaf ear to the silly chatter about him not running again. He’s heard plenty of that in the weeks since the midterm election drubbing. Much of the chatter hasn’t come from the usual, hostile GOP and Tea Party suspects. They’ve flatly said their goal is to make Obama a failed, flawed, president and presidency. The stand down talk has come in a string of op-ed pieces, web and blog talk, speculation and guesswork, from some respected Democrat Party supporters and operatives. If Obama self designates himself a lame duck president now supposedly the GOP will call off the attack dogs, embrace cooperation and bipartisanship, and this will help promote national unity, allow him to make real headway on attaining his foreign policy goals on the Afghanistan war, North Korean nukes, the Middle-East, shepherd through an economic recovery, and spare packs of Democratic incumbents from losing their jobs in another tidal wave against him in 2012. None of this makes any sense.

The GOP declared civil war on Obama not last month, or last year, but the instant the final vote declared him the presidential winner in 2008. The GOP did not launch its take no prisoner’s war solely to drive him from office. The war would have been waged against Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat that won the presidency. The only thing different about Obama from them is he’s African-American and that opened the racial floodgate to hector, harass, and pillory, and demean him. The GOP war is about regaining power, control, political dominance, protecting its corporate and financial interests, its strict construction definition and enforcement of the laws, and more broadly imposing its philosophical view of how government should be run. The presidency is the grand prize that pulls the political, economic and philosophical threads on how government and power will be exercised together for the GOP.

Then there’s this question. If Obama can perform the political miracle that will bring political peace and unity, help the economy and improve foreign policy, by not running then why couldn’t he do it as president? The Obama one-term proponents give no real answer to this.

The other blurred crystal ball gazing foisted off as political reason for Obama to pack it in in 2012 is that America has plummeted into an era of scarcity, class gaping divisions between rich and poor, plunging living standards, military decline, and faces major challenges to its economic dominance from China, India, Brazil, Japan, and Western Europe. In this view America is going the way of the Roman and British Empires. This supposedly explains the anger and angst of the Tea Party at Obama. In short, he’s the fall guy for America’s sink. This is bunkum too.

The Tea Party’s relentless rage and hounding of Obama is not fueled by insecurity over where the tomorrow’s paycheck is coming from, whether America will get clocked in Afghanistan, what Brazil will or won’t do in the financial markets, or that the government can’t pay its bills because of massive hock to everyone. It’s fueled by race and shrewd media and political manipulation. America has been in the era of economic uncertainty, foreign competition, and military shrinkage, for the past two decades. If America’s domestic and foreign slide alone was a reason to tell a president not to run that president should have been W. Bush in 2004.

There were no loud cries, endless polls, and legions of pundits clucking to Bush to step down. And if he did, it would somehow reverse America’s slide, or at least let him off the hook for it. But that’s exactly what Obama is being told.

A little history is in order. He can’t win. He’s made a mess of the economy. His foreign policy initiatives have stalled. The inexperience that his opponents repeatedly warned would do him in once he got in the White House proved true. A Gallup poll backed up the rampant talk that the President should not run for re-election because of political failures and public disgust; nearly sixty percent of the respondents said that. The president a multitude said with absolute certainty was irreparably damaged political goods and shouldn’t run for reelection, and if he did couldn’t win is not named Obama. It was Ronald Reagan. The year was 1982. The economy was still mired in double digit unemployment and inflation, and his approval numbers were in the tank. But we know the rest. Reagan didn’t listen to the pundits the critics, or heed the poll numbers. He won a smash reelection victory in 1984. Presidents from Truman to Clinton have all heard the dreaded three words, “one-term president” said about them after popularity plunges, legislative reversals, or midterm party losses.

Two years is an eternity in politics. A recovering economy a hard, and decisive breakthrough in the war on terrorism, or GOP internal self-destruction, could turn the tide in the White House’s favor. One more note, Obama’s popularity numbers at the same juncture of their presidency are higher than Truman, Reagan or Clinton’s, they won reelection and so can he.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk shows on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

In the never-ending crock maker of what some people will do to delegitimize Israel, the anti-Semites are at it again. This time their target is to boycott stores that sell Israeli goods. Because of that, I am planning on going to Trader Joe’s to buy some humus and tehina, if I can find any, and whatever else I can lay find that is made in Israel. Whether or not I eat anything of if it just sits and fsters in my refrigeraor is beside the point.

The point is never again. When they are not fighting us with missiles and weapons, they are fighting us through the media. When they are not fighting us through the media, they are fighting us at the universities. When they are not fighting us at the universities, they are fighting us in the aisles of the stores. Maybe one day people will see that there is a domino effect in the world and in life, and when one group is brought down, the rest of civilized society soon follows.

The advance PR flacks for HarperCollins knew exactly what they were doing when they calculatedly leaked a provocative passage from Sara Palin’s newest ego stroke book, America by Heart. The passage incited race. This time the target is not President Obama, at least not directly. It is First Lady Michelle Obama. Palin dredged up the worn, tired, and patently false charge claiming that Michelle sullied America when she allegedly said at a stop during the 2008 campaign she was not proud of America until Obama became a viable presidential candidate.
The quote was deliberately hacked up out of context. The oft, well-documented cite of the full quote, its context, and Michelle’s expansive clarification mean nothing to Palin. In her twist and bend of Michelle’s words, it becomes a statement of fact to show that Obama as she put it learned to hate white folks listening to the racial “rants” of their former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Palin’s silly, and ignorant distortion makes perfectly good sense when you consider her and the political calculus she’s using.

First there’s her. Palin’s track record in acknowledging, let alone promoting diversity during her short tenure as Alaska governor was abominable. She’s on record with only a terse utterance on hate crimes legislation and on cultural diversity. According to the 2000 Census figures, blacks made up officially about 4 percent of the state population. But those who self-identify as at least part African-American bump up the percentage much higher. When American Indians, Aleuts, Eskimos, and Asians are taken together, minorities make up about one quarter of Alaska’s population. This makes the state one of the most ethnically diverse in the nation. Palin didn’t even bother to pay the customary lip service to hiring and promoting a diverse staff. She had no problem making that clear in a heated and contentious meeting with black leaders in Alaska, including prominent ministers, NAACP officials, and community activists. They met with Palin to voice their complaint over minority hiring and job opportunities. During the meeting she allegedly said that she didn’t have to hire any blacks. Even more damning, she purportedly said that she didn’t intend to hire any. Her press secretary disputed the charge, but revealingly added that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill.
But even if Palin had taken a stab at diversity it wouldn’t alter her political calculus one bit. Race is and has been the sometimes sneaky and coded, and other times open hammer that packs of bloggers, websites, talk radio jocks, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and gaffe prone GOP operatives have used to fan their institutionalized Obama hatred. They know that a racial tweak here and there will always touch a raw among many bigots who have made it amply plain that they loathe Obama’s policies and by extension him and will stop at nothing to get him out of the White House.

Michelle fits into the Palin plan to use her as a racial foil to smear the president. Michelle is gracious, charming, photogenic, smart, and most importantly from a political view, popular. That makes her a ripe target to go after. By playing race and trying to discredit her Palin does two things in addition to taking a backdoor swipe at the president. She tears down someone who can actually pose as a counterweight to the ugliness and mountainous negatives that polls show that Palin has piles of. Her other devious motive in going after the First Lady for her mythical sin is that is it serves as a convenient reminder that Michelle and Obama ala Bill and Hillary Clinton are a tandem team and that the alleged failing or missteps of the president can just as easily be attributed to Michelle as well. That’s why Palin picked on Wright to remind her cheerleading crowd that Obama ad Michelle as she put it “spent two decades in the pews of Wright.”
Palin double downed on the race beat by rapping Attorney General Eric Holder for his quip that Americans are cowards for not talking about race. Palin of course, conveniently neglects to mention that Obama quickly disassociated himself from the Holder knock, and nothing more was heard about that from Holder or Obama. It was the same though tactic as with Michelle; dredge up and distort an old off the cuff quote on race and stand it on its head to make a grand case that Obama, his wife, and his administration are closet bigots and America loathers.

Race as always is the tried and true vehicle that the GOP hit team repeatedly uses to make that dumb case. Palin in her crude, ignorant, but calculating way, has jumped on that too. Considering the source, surely, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk shows on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

In times of war and danger people are often called upon to giveup something, to sacrifice for the sake of the war effort, the survival of a people, a nation or a tribe. By definition war means sacrifice. People kill. People die. People do without. That’s sacrifice.

Great leaders call forth from their people a spirit and willingness to sacrifice–to fight against the gathering storm, knowing that many will wither before its blasts, to go any distance and bear any burden to achieve something of value for nation or just humanity. And people, when called upon with eloquence, passion and truth, usually respond with amazing generosity and bravery.

It is therefore significant that in our ill-named War on Terror we have never been asked in a straightforward manner to sacrifice much of anything. In an otherwise compelling speech following 9-11, everything George W Bush said was right and true but an important paragraph was missing: The call to sacrifice. We were told to be resolute and not to let the terrorists win by making us afraid. We were encouraged to do our economic duty and continue to shop. Shopping is not exactly a clarion call to courage.

The message has not improved under President Obama. We still fight the terrorists. They have not yet broken our spirit but the costs of two wars may break us financially and therefore spiritually. We Americans have, because of the economy, let our side down. We no longer shop with our traditional combination of denial and the abandonment of reason.

We have been frightened into becoming a nation of sheep–meekly lining up to be wanded and searched without probable cause, x-rayed with a clarity that reveals not simply our gender but, for many males, our religion.

With a kind of “double-speak” worthy of 1984 and Big Brother we are told that our freedom depends on surrendering our freedom. Our TSA people, no doubt meaning well, are constantly spending our money, wasting our time and decaying our morale by coming up with new, expensive and intrusive ways of possibly detecting an attempt on us. Like generals preparing for the previous war, our security establishment is busy developing tools and toys that might have foiled previous attacks. TSA is unwilling to share any proof that our gadgets have, in fact, stopped anyone!

Now with full body scans, we are going to be subjected to radiation. Ah, but they claim it is minimal and couldn’t hurt anyone. Please look up what our government scientists told our soldiers and their families who were called upon to witness the atomic tests in Nevada in the 50s. Look at the benign claims for Agent Orange in Vietnam. Now check the cancer statistics for both exposed populations.

But TSA is not cruel or inflexible. If you want to decline having your privates made public, then you must agree to being groped, having your groin searched for lumps and having your butt all but penetrated in search of explosive underwear. For females it is having all this plus a thorough breast examination no longer even recommended by the Cancer Association.

Still, even our current intrusive and invasive protocols would not have detected the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, nor even the terrorist who put a bomb up his rectum and attempted to blow up the Saudi head of security. Our current technology would fail at that to, the x-rays mistaking a bomb for stool.

There are answers, less costly, intrusive and far less humiliating. Profiling, for one, is a start. Random searches are stupid. El Al looks for behavioral profiles as well as ethnic. It is silly to give a child or grandmother the same attention as young males from 20 to 35 of all ethnicities. Wanding can pick up metal. Since dogs will inevitably sniff crotches, let’s just work with what God gave them and train them to react to various forms of explosives. It is doable. Dogs are cheap technology.

What we are now doing is wrong as a matter of security, social policy, law and human dignity. The scare techniques making us afraid beyond our actuarial risks will backfire. There will be push back from this Orwellian false promise of security in exchange for giving up personal privacy. Constitutionally we are promised that we will be free from unreasonable search and seizure in our homes and by extension in our person.

At last, our government calls on us to sacrifice for the war. We are asked to sacrifice our freedom, our rights and our dignity. And in exchange for our dignity do we get safety? No. We get groped.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the accused terrorist and plotter ofthe embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, was acquitted of the most serious charges against him. The judge proudly announced that the Constitution worked. Maybe, but no body is happy. The Obama administration failed to prove two cases. One case was against the defendant, but the other, maybe ultimately the more important one, was the efficacy of our civilian courts for trying suspected terrorists.

That the first case failed is obvious but the second is only slightly more subtle. Ghailani, whatever his sentence, was convicted of conspiracy to destroy government property (and not the murder of 224 people, including 12 Americans). He will stay locked up until America makes peace with Al Qaeda, but not because our courts worked but because he can be held as an enemy combatant. This being the case, civil libertarians, left and right, wonder why we had this trial at all?

This result means to me that it would be utter madness to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad in a civilian court in New York City or any place else. Aside from the security costs, the vulnerability of witnesses and jurors, since KSM is not getting out of jail EVER, what is the point? Since conviction is not assured, as this test case establishes, why give KSM and Al Qaeda a microphone, publicity and let him spread his hate and lies?

There is a Jewish curse: May his name be erased. The evil deserve no monuments. Nor should they be the center of discussion. Their names should find no place in our memories, nor in any part of our souls. Take KSM out of the spotlight. Deny him a platform. Block him from the martyrdom he so clearly seeks. Stick him in a dark hole and: May his name be erased.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Jonathan got it right. We are a bunch of saps. Not only that, but we are saps walking a political plank of our own making. It’s the next greatest “to be or not to be” question in the illegal immigrant debate. If we kick all the undocumented workers and their kids out, then we lose cheap labor and tax the law enforcement officials who will have to search for them under every nook and cranny, in factories, in gardens and in some households. If we allow them to stay, we get to take out the welcome mats and strap them on our backs, with the justices leading the ceremony.

The problem is we need them because of cheap labor; the other problem is that we need their progeny, too because they provide jobs for the school system. The truth is most schools would be mighty empty if it weren’t for their kids.

So if the 45% that finish high school want to continue on to the hallowed halls of higher learning, let them, but let them pay for it like they do in ROTC. Just let them pay beforehand or by alternating one year of college with one year of service. After all, they aren’t here legally, so serving this country ought to be a small price to pay. The lawyers at the ACLU may froth at the mouth over supposed discrimination and the unfairness of it all. But what’s unfair is that they are here illegally, as in what’s against that oft forgotten body of work called the Constitution and that they are allowed to get in line ahead of those whose only crime was being born and raised not in another country but in another state.